In Which I Obtain Braids

Before...

After!

 

I have never been one of those kinds of people who come back from Spring Break with a healthy glow and a head full of braids. And I never knew much about how my African American friends took care of their hair. Maybe I was a bit self-centered in thinking that their hair would be just like mine. Or maybe that's just human nature. I've never been able to tell the difference. Between human nature and self-interest, that is. But I learned a lot yesterday!  Priscilla A took Caitlyn and me to have our hair braided by the women who do hers. We had to take a bus and a taxi and walk through a market to get there.
I have gotten used to trotros, the small public buses used for transport in the city. They are all rather decrepit vans, crammed full of people. You sit very close together, but the fare is so inexpensive, that it is definitely worth it. It is generally between 30 and 70 cents (GHC), which is the equivalent of 15 to 30 US cents. I think that I am giving the wrong impression in terms of the cost of living here. Compared to the US, it is dirt cheap. I can get a water bottle for less that 50 US cents. I can get a loaf of bread for the same. A fast food meal is 1.50 USD.
But people here have a lot less than people in the states. I almost feel guilty for paying them so little. Our Ghanian student friends put things in perspective for crafty type things: a necklace bought in Ghana is not worth the same price as an identical one bought in the US because the necklace in Ghana has not bought a plane ticket to America. That makes me feel a little bit better. But giving a taxi driver 2 USD for a ten minute ride just feels wrong. I feel like I'm cheating them, as many times as I am assured I am not. Caitlyn said that I am too nice. I hope that isn't the case.
But the walk through the market was both terrifying and amazing. It is the kind of thing that you see in National Geographic or on the Travel Channel. There were stalls and blankets lining the sidewalk (which was really just a rocky dirt path), all piled high with cloth and electronics, food and animals. There were chickens packed into cages, looking out at me dully. There was bacon cracking and spitting on small, coal-fed grills. There were piles of mangoes and pineapples and plantains. It was overwhelming and perfect at the same time. There were so many people. And so many of them wanted our attention. People would call out to say hello or to call us "obruni," which basically means a white foreign person. Or they wanted us to look at what they were selling. Or to touch us. I'm fighting my very WASPish ideas of personal space, at the moment. I think I have said it before, but in Ghana, there is no personal space.
Today, we went on a tour of Accra. We met our guide, a nice man in his thirties named Joe, who will be with us for all of our tours this semester. We started with a tour of the house in which W. E. B. DuBois lived for the three years before his death. DuBois was a mentor or sorts to the first Ghanian president and panafrican theorist and writer Kwame Nkrumah. And Nkrumah seems to be very popular here. I have been taught that Nkrumah started out with good intentions but was corrupt by the time he was removed from office. The tour guide at the Nkrumah museum, the next stop, blamed the CIA. I'm not sure what to believe, because CIA interference in African governments is hardly unprecedented. We had lunch at a lovely cafe called Melting Moment, or something to do with melting. Then we were walked through Jamestown, which is one of the shanty villages in Accra. You see pictures of things like that. But I'm not sure if I just didn't believe it, or if I dismissed it because it was too depressing. I saw a river with banks made entirely of litter. White and black plastic clogging the water, like dead husks, drained of anything remotely human. The guide said that not all of the people who live there are terribly poor. Some could even afford houses of their own in other areas. But they stay because it is the place that they know. The place their family knows. I don't know how I would feel about that. I have been conditioned to want bigger and better.No matter how much I might resist the impulse, I am a snob at heart, although the tenancy manifests itself in my choice of what I do in my free time rather than in the career I have chosen to pursue.
I didn't expect this. I don't know what I expected, but this was not it. I have never seen this kind of poverty. And Ghana is considered the golden child of African development! What would it be like in a country like the Sudan or the Congo? I can't help but think about South Africa. There are places in South Africa that could be confused with American suburbs. And they have slums that go on for miles right next door. Is this what the West has done to Africa? I can't help but think what might have happened had Europeans never colonized this continent. Would Japan have reached the prominence it did had it been colonized? I think that it is so important for people in America and in Europe to see what colonialism had done to African nations. It left them in tatters, and they are only just starting to find their feet again. I want no part in anything like that. It should never happen again.